On February 24th, the officialTwitteraccount for the animeOdd Taximade a special announcement. It is going to start a new spin-off project that will encompass at least a few different forms of media. This new project will be calledRoOT / Route of Odd Taxi. Note the special capitalization inRoOT, which marks what is quite a good anagram of the project’s full name.The anticipation leading up to the reveal started the day before the actual tweet was posted. The officialOdd TaxiTwitter account posted a mysterious photo with just “02/24 00:00” and the silhouette of a windshield, along with a caption that had the same text. And sure enough, on February 24th at midnight, the announcement tweet was made.RELATED:Anime Film Review: Odd Taxi: In the WoodsThe tweet did not reveal much information yet, but it did say that the first part of the project will be a comic serialization. Hopefully that will lead to more episodes of the quirky anime as well! The tweet also has a new promotional image for theRoOTproject, with the two main characters, Satoshi and Reina, in their human form.
Odd Taxiis amysteryset in a Tokyo populated by anthropomorphic animals, and the main character is a 41-year-old walrus named Odokawa, who drives a taxi. The story is unveiled through the conversations he has with his customers as he drives them around the city. He learns many tales of mysteries and oddities in Tokyo, and eventually about the disappearance of a girl that ends with both the police and the yakuza on Odokawa’s tail.
Odd Taxioriginally aired in 2021, and even received an English dub due to its popularity onCrunchyrollin early 2022. Recognizing that the anime has fans around the world, even the tweet about the newRoOTproject was written in both English and Japanese to ensure that international fans could also celebrate the big news. It is rare to see anime studios write these announcements in English, so it was great to see that kind of recognition of the international community as well as the domestic one.
At the time of publishing this article, the Twitter post already had over 750,000 views in just three days, with over 7,000 likes and nearly 3,500 retweets. This shows that theOdd Taxifans are here for this new project, and they are excited about it. While there are not many more details yet, that doesn’t stop fans from being hyped about the next part ofOdd Taxi’sunique journey.
